Realising that the creature that had settled in the fire node was incredibly similar to the fiery guardian Sunna had set to protect the Soul Prison caused me to grind my teeth in cold fury. I wanted to tear the thing apart, to rip out its soul if I could and fill it with Ice and Darkness until it was nothing but a shadow of its former self, or maybe just a Shadow and nothing more. Without really thinking about it, I launched a barrage of Icicles through the door, though it took me only an instant to realise just how futile the attack was. Sure, the Icicles struck the fire and made it flare for a few moments, but given that the elemental was sitting on a fire node, I’d have to be far, far more powerful to extinguish it without a lot of preparation.

No, a direct attack was quite futile. If I wanted to destroy the elemental, I had two options, either strike some sort of weak point and end it with a single, devastating attack or limit the amount of power it can drain from the node and starve it out. Or a combination of the two, something similar to the way I had destroyed the Yeti sitting on the Ice Node in the frozen valley. Maybe I’d be able to use the node’s power against it but I doubted it. An attack like that would come down to competing against it using our respective mastery over fire and, well, the thing was quite literally made of fire. There was no way I’d be able to overcome it in that discipline, not for a long, long time if ever.

If only there was a way to cut off its access to fuel, like I had with the elemental that guarded the Soul Prison, taking away the flame powering it had allowed me to overcome an enemy far beyond me. But here, that flame was quite literally part of the Astral River, gushing into the physical realm. Maybe that had been the problem on Mundus, the reason why I, despite my incredibly low level, had been able to defeat that guardian. It might have originally sat on a Fire Node, maybe a minor one that balanced the scale with the Ice Nexus in Neyto but the node shifted for some reason. Maybe due to seasonal changes, maybe due to continental drift or something like that or maybe due to the Grandmother taking action, any of those options sounded reasonable. With a Fire Node, the guardian would have been a formidable challenge, one that I doubted anyone could casually face. It would also explain why the area around the den was filled with low-level enemies. If the concentration of Fire Astral Power there was higher than it was elsewhere, the creatures of the frozen north might have preferred to stay away, leaving only those too weak to set up shop elsewhere in the area.

But that was all supposition and by now, it didn’t really matter. What had come to pass was in the past, now I needed to deal with this critter. Or rather, I wanted to deal with it and take possession of the Fire Node, if only to let Alex use it for their smithing work. And maybe to get some experimentation done, I had a few ideas I wanted to test but couldn’t, not without access to a strong enough flame. The node would certainly do, but first, I had to get it.

Only, how could I get to it? A direct attack was almost impossible. It was hidden in the fires, I’d first have to get rid of the fire, at least for a moment, before I could take aim and strike but that was easier said than done. And even if I could strike, trying to destroy a creature of fire was fairly difficult in and of itself, there were no weak points, nothing that I’d consider a vital area I could target. Just a whole lot of power, all packed in a volatile medium and given sentience, maybe even sapience, and license to burn.

Water was the obvious answer when it came to putting out fires, water or earth. Maybe even Wind, depending on whether the creature needed oxygen to exist or not but I wasn’t confident I’d be able to either pull out all the air from an area or isolate the oxygen and pull that away. Either would be an incredibly useful way to strike and something I should look into at some point, but for now, it wasn’t something I could do.

Stolen story; please report.

So, Water and Earth. Though, if I wanted to use Earth, it would essentially try to do the same as Wind would, push away all the air and take away the oxygen a fire would use but then, Water did the same, just with a different medium. At what point would I have to start ignoring the laws of physics as I understood them and start thinking about reality with a magical focus, as opposed to a physics one? What was the fundamental difference between elemental Fire or generally magical Fire and physical one? Or rather, between anything magical and its purely physical equivalent?

An excellent example, and likely the one I could wrap my head around the easiest, was to think about my Frozen Shuttles and normal, ordinary water, poured into a mould and left to freeze. The results might look quite similar, depending on the clarity of the ordinary water, but I was quite certain that they’d have some major differences when it came to their physical behaviour. My Shuttles, even before I had recreated them from Hard Ice, were a lot harder than ordinary ice and could easily hold an edge, behaving more akin to some sort of cold, brittle Iron. Maybe not quite as hard, at least for normal Ice, but certainly not as unstable as frozen water. Similarly, where normal ice would melt quite rapidly, my Ice could take some heat, though it would eventually melt. Just not as fast as normal ice and that was taking into account that some of the conjured Ice would fade back into the Astral River.

So, what did that mean for magical Fire? It certainly didn’t need the usual triangle of fuel, heat and oxygen. It needed Astral Power but I had a feeling that the other three made it easier to conjure Fire. To liken it to my Ice again, it had been a lot easier to conjure Ice while in the frozen North, even if I didn’t use the snow and ice around me. The low temperature increased my efficiency and maybe the general presence of ice had increased it even further. Maybe some sort of ‘like-calls-to-like’ effect, I wasn’t sure. I’d test if we came across an area with low temperatures but no ice at all.

But if I were to assume that the idea held merit, the solution might be to decrease the Fire Elemental’s efficiency by denying it what it normally needed. It was already operating without fuel, at least without any I could see, meaning if I could cut it off from heat and oxygen, it would have to provide the power for all three. Cutting it off from heat meant, obviously, Ice, while cutting it off from oxygen was a lot more complicated. Water or Earth were the obvious answer but where would I have to put it? The Fire Elemental was mobile, I doubted it would just sit there and let me shovel dirt on it until the elemental was covered. It certainly would try to burn me and my shovel if I tried, so maybe the not-so-obvious answer was the right one. In other words, maybe the right answer was Wind. The warehouse looked fairly solid and contained, meaning if I could somehow keep fresh oxygen from going in through the door, I might be able to limit how much oxygen was in there. I doubted I’d be able to evacuate the entire thing, vacuum chambers of that size were incredibly complicated and expensive, but keeping the oxygen out? That might just work.

Sadly, closing the door was out. I needed the open door to reduce the temperature inside and given that the door used to be shut, closing it wouldn’t destroy the elemental, that would be too easy. No, the door needed to stay open and I’d have to figure out some way to stop oxygen from flowing through it while allowing a continued temperature exchange.

If I could weaken the elemental like that, I might just be able to draw away the power from the node, eventually taking it out. But it would partially come down to distance, I needed to get close enough to work, especially for the finicky work the oxygen barrier would doubtlessly be.

Given that I had no desire to get incinerated, the best way to get close was to move along the wall and raise a new concrete barrier next to the door. That way, I’d be able to work on both sides of the door, I just had to take the long way around, or maybe I could use my cloak to fly across, though I’d have to be careful. And in the meantime, I might be able to set something up for Alex some sort of simple energy tap that allowed them to drain a bit of power from the node, allowing them to do some work of their own.

It wouldn’t weaken the elemental, I’d only be able to drain what it didn’t use and radiate out into the environment but it would give my companions something to do.